Feijoa is hardy to around -10°C once established and already grows across most of New Zealand, not just the warmer districts — which makes it a different kind of comparison to lemon or lime, where variety choice is doing real work to close a cold-hardiness gap. For feijoa, the questions that actually change your harvest are whether a variety needs a pollination partner, and when in the season it fruits.
The Comparison
| Variety | Season | Pollination | Notable For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Unique | Very early | Truly self-fertile | Prolific bearer from a young age; good keeper |
| Anatoki | Extremely early (2-3 weeks before Unique) | Needs a pollinator | Sweet, mild flavour; compact habit |
| Kaiteri | Early | Needs a pollinator | Large, smooth fruit on a vigorous tree; starts before Unique, carries on longer |
| Apollo | Mid-season | Semi self-fertile | Large, delicate fruit; grows to 2.5m |
| Mammoth | Mid-to-late season | Needs a pollinator (Triumph recommended) | Large fruit on a strong, upright tree to 3m |
| Triumph | Late season | Good pollinator for Mammoth; itself needs one | Firm-skinned, sharp-flavoured, good storer |
| Wiki Tu | Late season | Partially self-fertile | Dwarf (2.5m), large mild-flavoured fruit |
| Bambina | — | Self-fertile dwarf | Best feijoa for pots and small gardens |
This comparison draws on the NZ Feijoa Growers Association's published variety guide (the same tier of authority as the NZ Citrus Growers Incorporated manual already used for mandarin and orange), with pollination and size detail added from Tui NZ's variety-favourites guide.
Self-Fertile vs Needs a Pollinator
This is the split that matters most before you plant a single tree. Unique is described as truly self-fertile and a prolific bearer from a young age, making it the lowest-risk option if you only have room for one tree. Bambina is also self-fertile and stays dwarf, which makes it the pick for a pot or a small garden rather than an open bed. Apollo is semi self-fertile and Wiki Tu partially self-fertile — both crop alone but do better with a second variety nearby.
Most of the rest genuinely need a pollination partner: Anatoki, Kaiteri, Kakariki and Mammoth are all documented as needing one. Triumph is specifically named as a good pollinator for Mammoth, which makes Mammoth-and-Triumph a sourced, deliberate pairing rather than a guess — plant them together if you want Mammoth's large fruit.
Stretching the Season
Feijoa varieties split cleanly into early, mid and late season, and the source data is explicit that planting across that spread — not just picking one variety — is what stretches your harvest window and lifts total yield.
Early season: Anatoki (extremely early, 2-3 weeks ahead of Unique), Kaiteri, Kakariki, Gemini, Pounamu and Unique itself.
Mid-season: Apollo, Den's Choice, Kakapo, and Mammoth (which leans mid-to-late).
Late season: Opal Star, Triumph and Wiki Tu.
A planting that combines an early self-fertile tree like Unique with a late variety like Triumph covers both ends of the season and, since Triumph also pollinates a Mammoth if you add one, sets up a straightforward three-tree combination without needing to research pairings from scratch.
Where Zone Actually Matters
Unlike lemon or lime, feijoa's hardiness isn't the deciding factor here — every variety above is drawn from a single sourced list without a documented cold-hardiness split between them, and the crop as a whole is already established as hardy to -10°C once mature. Both temperate and sub-tropical gardeners can grow any of the varieties above; this isn't a case where one zone gets the "safe" subset and the other gets more freedom.
What zone still affects is a young tree's first couple of winters before it reaches that established hardiness. A temperate garden's frost season runs deeper into spring than a sub-tropical one, so the general shelter precautions below matter more in the first year or two further south — not because any variety here is unsuited to a colder zone, but because an establishing root system is always more vulnerable than a mature one.
Planting Timing
Feijoa is planted as potted nursery stock rather than grown from seed, with the same window across NZ's zones in the current data: September through November, with harvest running March through July as fruit falls naturally when ripe. Tui NZ notes autumn planting is also viable in frost-free areas — spring is used here as the option that's safe everywhere, following the same approach as this site's other citrus and fruit-tree comparisons.
A Practical Starting Point
If you want one low-risk tree, Unique is the clear default — self-fertile, reliably productive from a young age, and doesn't ask you to plan a pollination partner around it. If you have room to expand, add a late-season variety like Triumph for a longer harvest, and consider a Mammoth alongside it for genuinely large fruit, since that specific pairing is a sourced, working combination rather than a guess.
Ready to plan the rest of your fruit bed against the calendar? Check the NZ Temperate Planting Calendar or the NZ Sub-Tropical Planting Calendar for your zone.